


Life is But

by still_lycoris



Category: Firefly
Genre: Character Study, Dreams, Dreamsharing, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-03-01
Updated: 2009-03-01
Packaged: 2018-03-17 07:11:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 806
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3520145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/still_lycoris/pseuds/still_lycoris
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>River thinks about the dreams of her shipmates.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Life is But

River loved to dream. But only other people’s dreams.

Dreams in general pleased her because everyone was the same in dreams. They all didn’t make sense, lacked in logic. Firing of the synapses that sent random pictures that formed some sort of confused story and seemed to make sense as you lived it but really was unformed chemical reaction. After the Academy, River found that life was very like that. 

Sometimes when she couldn’t sleep or _didn’t_ sleep or was dozing off, she would dip into the dreams of the _Serenity_ crew. It was not difficult. Logically, she knew that other people couldn’t do that and therefore, it was strange, but since she could do it, she enjoyed it. Sometimes it happened by accident when she was almost asleep and she would find herself in other people’s heads.

She didn’t like Simon’s dreams very much. They all had an anxious undertone to them, usually involving her. He regularly dreamed that he was doing operations on someone who then turned into her and he panicked. That dream always made him wake up and cry. She preferred his more random dreams where he was trying to teach Jayne how to waltz. That was at least quite funny, especially as Jayne kept falling over. Simon didn’t find them funny though. He always woke up feeling tense.

Kaylee’s dreams were nicer. She dreamed about nice food and pretty dresses and lovely big engines and about the crew having fun. Occasionally, these dreams got muddled up and it was the rest of the crew eating nice food and wearing nice dresses (River did not think that pink taffeta suited the captain and told him so when she next saw him) while Kaylee tried to fix an engine that simply wouldn’t come right. Sometimes, she dreamed about Simon and River wasn’t sure what she felt about those dreams so she usually left then and diving into another synaptic brain pattern.

Wash’s dreams were nearly always happy ones. There were ships and dinosaurs and Zoe and wild heroics. He had a reoccurring dream where he was going to be executed and Zoe saved him and carried him off to a hut. Often, this dream ended with lots of babies. River liked that dream a _lot_.

Zoe’s dreams were more complicated than her husbands. Sometimes, she dreamed nice dreams about Wash and those were simple but sometimes her dreams were angry ones about the war and River didn’t like those. Mal was often in her dreams too and sometimes bad things happened to him and that would upset Zoe.

Jayne’s dreams were nice in that they were completely uncomplicated. He dreamed about violence and sex, sometimes at the same time. When River drifted in, she knew that she wouldn’t have to worry about things not making sense because Jayne’s dreams always did make sense, in a fashion. She could just bask in them and totally understand everything and it didn’t really matter.

Inara and Shepard Book’s dreams, she avoided when she could. They were strange and baffling and never felt right for the people that River knew they were. Some mysteries, River could not unravel and when she tried, it left her scared and unhappy.

The Captain’s dreams were the strangest dreams. His dreams rarely had any sort of plot but were full of symbolism. Things were broken that shouldn’t be and nothing worked properly. People appeared in places they didn’t fit or just didn’t appear at all. They did strange things and nothing worked quite right and Mal just tried to get through all of it without too much fuss. And since his life was a little bit like that, River supposed that it made sense.

“Have sweet dreams,” Simon would always tell her when he put her to bed.

“Dreams are meaningless,” she told him. “A hallucination of a randomly firing brain. But with linking symbolism that we cannot translate. We want them to have meaning because they are constant in their illogicality.”

Simon didn’t know what to say to that. Simon often didn’t know what to say about things when he thought she was being strange. That made River sad because when she’d been younger, he’d always had a reply, even if it had just been to tell her she was a dummy. Poor Simon.

“What do you dream about, meimei?” he asked her, stroking her hair.

But River didn’t like to think about her dreams. They were all about cold steel and needles and people that slept into silence and didn’t think of anything but silence. They made her scream to get the silence of the dead out of her mind. Better to twist in the unreality of everyone else’s dreams. But Simon wouldn’t understand.

“Meimei?”

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” she told him instead. “For life is but a dream.”

**Author's Note:**

> Written for 40fandoms


End file.
